The evolution of the trust instrument, notes Columbia Law School’s Katharina Pistor,how today’s national legal systems “have become items on an international menu of options.” The super rich choose from this menu “the laws by which they wish to be governed.”
What can we do? We can fight back, and, at the global level, some reformers — like the University of Virginia Law School’s Ruth Mason — are even feeling optimistic about the struggles ahead., a small club of rich nations working through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD, set international tax policy.
Policymakers in the 20th century, Mason notes, either saw corporate tax avoidance as “unproblematic” or “regarded the costs of curbing it as too high.” But that hands-off mindset, Mason argues, “ended abruptly with the 2008 financial crisis.” The resulting job losses and budget shortfalls led to a “new intolerance of corporate tax dodging” as one legislative hearing after anotherastounding examples of corporate tax arrogance.